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Cleveland to launch new economic-development website aimed at site selectors, businesses

CLE ED website screenshot.jpg

Cleveland's economic-development department plans to launch a new, freestanding website this afternoon, in an effort to recast the city and make a better first impression on business leaders and their corporate real estate advisors.
(City of Cleveland)

To have a good website might not get you through the door. But to have a bad website will not get you through the door at all.

CLEVELAND, Ohio -- When a group of real estate site selectors toured Cleveland last year, one of them didn't realize the city edged up to a lake. Another asked where all the pollution was, recalled Tracey Nichols, the city's economic-development director.

Those responses reinforced the idea that what's happening on the ground - in business, workforce training and development - isn't necessarily visible beyond Cleveland's borders. Corporate leaders and the people who guide their real estate decisions see the city as old, with a patina of rust and considerable competition from other Midwest markets, including Columbus and Chicago.

A new website won't necessarily fix those perception problems. But Nichols and her staff hope that a business-specific online presence and a new tagline - "Built by industry. Inspired by innovation." - will give executives and their advisors a better first impression of a city they might otherwise overlook.

Cleveland's freestanding economic-development site, rethinkcleveland.org, is scheduled to launch Thursday afternoon. With more than 140 pages of information, the site includes everything from an interactive real estate database to a flow chart illustrating the complicated approval process for opening a food truck in the city.

"For businesses, time is always money," said Nichols, whose staff has been working on the project for more than 18 months. "To go to the city's website and get to economic development takes extra time, and there's a lot of information on our main pages. The city's website is geared for citizens. We need a website that goes straight to business."

Atlas Advertising, the Colorado-based agency that worked on the Cleveland project, manages 200 economic-development websites for cities, regions and states. Ben Wright, Atlas's chief executive officer, said a year-old website that promotes the Columbus area is luring 75 percent of its traffic from outside that region. And users are spending twice as much time on that website as they did on the old one.

"The goal of every site selector is to narrow the field," said Jim Robey of Mohr Partners, a real estate advisory firm that provided research and analysis for the Cleveland site. "If you don't have a good website where people can answer questions easily, it narrows the field much faster. ... To have a good website might not get you through the door. But to have a bad website will not get you through the door at all."

The new site, which welcomes viewers with images of manufacturing, healthcare and the city skyline, can be translated into more than 50 languages. Like the website for JobsOhio, the state's economic-development agency, rethinkcleveland.org features a property-search section that relies on an Atlas real estate program called InSite. Users can pull up a list of available sites and then look at demographics, nearby transportation options, zoning and other information.

Or they can hop over to pages that outline city incentives, cost-of-living comparisons for workers, supplier networks for major local industries and all the permitting and approval processes a business might encounter - with associated fact sheets and lists of people to call.

Nonprofit groups including Team NEO, which focuses on bringing new employers to the region, already have websites designed to court business leaders and people scouting for corporate real estate. But, as Nichols points out, those sites aren't Cleveland-specific. They span a broad geographic area. In conversations with site selectors, the city often takes a backseat to the suburbs - in part because of decades-old images of Cleveland that aren't necessarily correct.

Atlas interviewed local business leaders and surveyed 25 to 30 site selectors last year. The agency found that Cleveland faces stiff competition for projects and jobs from other large Midwestern cities; people outside of Cleveland still see the city as an aging Rust Belt burg; and Cleveland needs to build on high-profile assets, like the Cleveland Clinic, to change those national views.

Those findings, and other research, led to the "Rethink Cleveland" web address and the tagline that speaks to the city's industrial past and higher-tech potential. The website debut is the big splash, but the city's economic-development department also expects to launch an advertising campaign next year, with print and digital ads running inside the region and on a national scale.

The project, including new print materials for the economic-development department, cost roughly $150,000, Nichols said. Some of that money came from the Cleveland Citywide Development Corp., a nonprofit organization that reviews applications for city loans and oversees a portfolio of public loans, including federal funds that flow through the city. The nonprofit generates fees and other income through loan management.

Living Cities, a partnership between major foundations and financial institutions, provided a grant.

The website required considerable time and attention, Nichols said, but it didn't draw on any taxpayer money. "Believe me, a lot of our staff worked on it after hours, because people were very committed to it," she said.

Cleveland City Councilman Tony Brancatelli, who sits on the Cleveland Citywide Development Corp.'s board, sees the website as a way to shed bureaucracy and help businesses find essential data and real estate listings - for public and private properties - in a single place.

"The more user-friendly we could make this, the less government-like we could make this, and the more business-like we could make this, the better off we are," he said. "We were trying to get away from that phrase 'We're here from the government. We're here to help.' Because that scares a lot of people away."

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